People of faith and hope are often unrealistic, and the realists have little faith or hope. We shall find a way out of the present situation only if realism and faith become blended together as they were in some of the great teachers of mankind.*
Erich Fromm

Every idea and every pursuit of an idea inside us is life. … The lack of ideas is death.**
Thomas Bernhard

Don’t be too realistic, don’t be over-reasonable.

Realism need faith and faith realism.

Wallace Stevens wrote of reality needing imagination and imagination needing reality.^

John O’Donohue writes about how movement needs stillness and stillness need movement:

Stillness is the canvas against which movement can become beautiful.  We can only appreciate movement against the background of stillness.  Were everything kinetic, we would not know what movement is.  As sound is sistered to silence, movement is sistered to stillness.^^

I woke this morning to find within myself a desire to keep moving and to keep wrestling for the gift I want to bring to others.

So, I will add another tension within which a rhythm of life pulses:

Struggle is sistered to acceptance, that is to making a space for the cause of our discontent.

But our deepest pleasures as artists result not only from surmounting but from continuously engaging with the difficulties that represent our greatest ambition.*^

*From Erich Fromm’s The Revolution of Hope;
**From Thomas Bernhard’s Correction, quoted in Peter Turchi’s A Muse and A Maze;
^See Wallace Stevens’ The Necessary Angel;
^^From John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty;
*^From Peter Turchi’s A Muse and A Maze.